#togawa x nozue

I am still thinking about Old Fashion Cupcake.

Such an important part of this is that the typical coming-of-age narrative is about being young and free and discovering yourself and in those stories everyone knows who they are by the time they’re graduating university. Everyone knows their own shape by the time they head into the working wold, obviously. They have partners, they know their own heart and soul, they know who and what they are and what they want and what life has for store in them and that’s when life start, life starts after you discover yourself.

But not in Old Fashon Cupcake.

Instead we’re being given the narrative of two adult man, one nearing 40, and the discovery of what it means to be queer and what it means to be different and what it means when the box you’ve always shaped yourself to fit is the wrong one. The idea that life can happen and you can live and you can still discover yourself.

Nozue has spent a lifetime fitting himself into the box he thinks he should be in, trying to fit into every nook and cranny of ‘normal’ without any consideration for himself. He has filled out the box and hollowed himself out in the process.

And now he’s hitting a time in his life when he’s expected to have figured everything out, to be living the life he knows he wants, to be an Adult and a Man and to know what the future holds… but all he sees is swathes and swathes of the same hollow life, the same false box, the same lies he’s been trying to make the truth.

Togawa is younger than him but he’s accepted that he doesn’t fit the box everyone expects him to, he’s accepted that he has to make his own shape, find his own place. That he can live life and be himself. And in finding himself, he’s learned to see people who don’t. And he sees Nozue.

This narrative is so deeply, inherently queer that it is beautiful because it is about the kind of self-discovery journey that comes from a world telling you one thing only to realize that what you want, what you need, who you are, doesn’t fit that path. And when you’re never offered an alternative that fits you… you take that path and you make the path work.

But when you finally have a chance to see the path that wasn’t? To see the path you wantedandneeded but were never given… you grab it with both and you run and then you panic because this in unfamiliar and new and that’s terrifying.

Nozue is peeking down a path that is everything he’s ever dreamt of, freedom and friendship and desserts and a partnership and a chance at more and he is both reveling and he is panicking because he’s never felt this before. He’s never felt this nameless hope and joy that bubbles up and fills up the hollow parts of himself that he shaped for society.

Being yourself, even in little moments, even in the tiniest things, when you haven’t been for so, so long? It’s exhilarating. And it’s terrifying. The box is comforting when you’ve contorted yourself so long… stretching is painful and scary even as it relieves and reveals pain you have forgotten about.